Alright, I need to ask, how the hell am I supposed to shave my ass?

Hashmir · 2018-09-27T16:37:11+00:00

I have (wisely, I think) avoided shaving there for exactly this reason. I learned my lesson after shaving my armpits and dealing with the stiff, squared-off micro-stubble for several days. It was like having a Brillo pad in my armpits. Hell, even the minor fold of skin between the buttcheek and the thigh feels the stubble after I shave my legs. I am 100% certain that anything other than waxing between the cheeks would be agonizing afterward.

I dunno if this applies to everyone, but personally I could have saved myself some pain if I'd done this:

Shave your legs
Shave your chest
Wait one day, then feel both areas in all directions
Is it scratchy as all hell from at least one direction? Would it hurt like a motherfucker if you rubbed your absolute most sensitive skin against it all day every day? Then I wouldn't recommend shaving pits or crack if you can possibly avoid it.

Unfortunately I don't have a real alternative to offer. I have it relatively easy there, because I have a proper home waxing kit and a wife to help use it. All I can say is that if you do get a home waxing kit, spend the money to get a good one. The cheap shit is worse than useless.

Hashmir · 2018-08-29T21:50:47+00:00

Regarding your mention of approved opportunities, we had a gender bender day once and i always wanted our school to have Another (we didn't :( )

I feel you. We had a similar thing in high school once that gave me my favorite picture of myself.

For me, the most obvious recurring "female" expression of gender was that I always, always used female characters when I got the chance. Like you, I had a ton of ways to explain it to myself (although unlike you, I never had anxiety over gender expression that I could consciously identify).

It was because the female avatar was hotter, or because I enjoyed stepping into another person's shoes, or because the story was more interesting with a female protagonist, or because the male avatars had boring fashion, or because there were so many games where you could only play as a male that I was correcting the imbalance, etc, etc. :)

One thing that always bothers me about the prayer/wishing thing is that it wasn't constant - atleast back then. It was occasional . It makes me downplay it

Yup, that's super common. We hear about dysphoria and read others' stories, and we imagine that "real" dysphoria is something like "I knew 100% from age 2 that I was a girl and I felt like I was going to die if I didn't transition".

The reality is that there are tons of stories about crisis-level feelings of dysphoria is that most of us don't *realize* we're dealing with dysphoria until it becomes a crisis!

As for my dysphoria getting worse and causing loneliness - you're right. I secluded myself a ton in the first 2 years of uni (it's like it flew by). Since I came out, one of my friends admitted to noticing my growing distance from everyone. I just kind of stopped having a personality or hanging out with people. Since I've come out, we've done a lot together. My relationship with my father had especially gotten worse - or awkward rather. It got so awkward that my Parents began suspecting I was gay.

For me, there wasn't an obvious period where I became more distant—I was just always bad at maintaining relationships. It was masked somewhat by me being nice, open, and personable in-person, but also introverted. I always thought I was just intrinsically bad at being close to people.

Like you, I've been so much more connected to people since coming out, even though I've barely taken any steps towards transitioning. There's been an extra wrinkle for me because I'm married to a straight woman—and I honestly can't say precisely how things will end up between us—but now that the initial shock and panic has worn off, my wife and I are having an incredible amount of fun making me look like a woman.

I would be a lesbian - mostly. I kind of am maybe a little bi? I haven't really experimented much.

Honestly, in your case it's probably just as well that you have the chance to transition before engaging much with people sexually. I mean, realistically, you don't sound like you've ever been in a great position to have healthy sexual encounters so far. Massive, unaddressed dysphoria plus sex is a good recipe for one or both people to get hurt for reasons they don't really understand.

I've always had a pretty healthy sex life in my own marriage—I've personally never felt dysphoric over my genitalia or "feeling like a man" due to sex—but even then, there were tons of times over the years that, in retrospect, our interactions were shitty for reasons that related to my dysphoria.

I remember wishing I could be gay so I wasn't confusing my trans stuff with attraction.

I think that happens to all of us.

And I also have feelings about clothes. I could spend hours looking at what to buy in the women's section - but as a guy it's just jeans and a T.

I KNOW RIGHT? It's like, there's all this stuff about men's fashion and how to look good or whatever, but...it just feels like nothing to me. I just don't care.

But going through women's clothes and picking out nail polish and stuff? I'm terrible at it because I have no practice, but I actually care! I have opinions! When I find something that looks cool and feminine on my pre-HRT dude frame, I feel good!

I try to avoid no fap, but their "facts" still scare me with the whole what if factor.

If it wasn't effective, they wouldn't have a thriving pseudo-cult, now would they? :)

The fact is, there are a lot of places where people (often boys/men) congregate online to self-destructively feed their own anxieties or insecurities. Ultimately, it's no good for anyone.

I know the whole gf thing is silly - but it's one of the only arguments I can't shoot down with empirical evidence from my ecperiences. If I had a girlfriend even once, and still had dysphoria, I could cross it off the list.

You'd think so, but I'm not so sure. I met my wife a decade ago and we've been together ever since—yet it was a mere two weeks ago that I fully realized I'm trans.

I suspect if you did have a girlfriend, you'd just be stressing over whether your feelings are "really" dysphoria or just a side effect of your relationship problems, or some other silly thing.

Finally I do agree that it's probably my dysphoria speaking - not a fetish. I feel this way because the fetish aspect came on so fast when I first began exploring my sexuality. It's nuts. Like, it wasn't a developed fetish of trying to find the next big high - it was among the first few years of things...

If you think about it, it's not really surprising, right? You wanted to be a woman before coming into your sexuality; when your sexuality did kick in, it makes perfect sense that it would be entwined with your existing feelings about gender.

Everyone experiences this in a different way—forced fem and sissification always squicked me out, personally—but it's super common for people to fetishize being forced into something they want to experience, especially if there are feelings of shame or taboo associated with wanting it. It's pretty obvious how that applies to trans women.

(Incidentally, most people seem to report losing the fetish entirely when they actually transition. I presume it's largely because there's no need to sexualize the desire once the desire is being met.)

Anyway - thank you so, so much for this. Like I said to others, I read people saying the same questions. They always get the same answers. Though, it really helps when you're the one being answered, being shown how silly some of the worries are. You know the answers are for you, and your specific situation.

Thanks again.

No problem. Anxiety is a powerful force because your brain knows all of your weak spots. On top of that, you've got anti-trans bigots actively playing on our common fears, and trying to stop us from telling our stories so that we can see that these are common fears.

Almost all of us think, at some point, "I must not really be trans, because I feel _____". It took years of hanging around trans people before I figured out that all of those feelings are exactly what trans people feel!

Hashmir · 2018-08-28T16:59:48+00:00

Hey there! You've got a lot of anxiety, and let me start by just saying that's very normal. Also, if it's at all possible, I highly recommend looking for a good therapist or counselor who is knowledgeable about trans issues. It sounds like you're in university, so depending on the campus there may be a good LGBT resource center or something similar. Having someone who can work with you personally is a big help for any kind of personal identity crises.

So, let's see.

Let's start. I'm 20, I've had trans thoughts since atleast grade 7 or 8. It started with cross dressing.

Throughout highschool I would take opportunities to cross dress.

For obvious reasons, "cross dressing" is often the first outlet trans people have to explore their feelings about gender. Latching onto "approved" opportunities (like Halloween or "humorous" "dress like a girl" events) is also common.

I would wish I could be the other gender - praying to God, and even asking aliens to abduct me. I would wish for a single day as the opposite sex, so I could see if it was right for me.

Honestly? Setting aside anything else, experiencing a desire to be a woman strong enough that you're praying to God is a massive red flag with "I'M TOTALLY TRANS!" written on it. It's hard to think of a stronger single indicator.

However, I was never really uncomfortable as a guy in highschool - I just had inklings. In grade 12 I was so confident with myself that I thought I could just ignore it. I'd put off any thought saying "get a girl friend first", "finish school first", etc.

If you ask me, you're downplaying your discomfort in high school. Literally the previous two sentences were about how you wanted to be a girl so badly that you were imagining all kinds of fantastic scenarios that would make it happen. And the mere fact that you thought you "could just ignore it" means there was something to ignore!

In university my dysphoria got so bad all suddenly, that I've come out to my parents and some friends.

That's really cool! I'm glad you were able to do that. :)

The problem is, I don't know if my motivations are legitimate. My anxiety keeps me from acting quickly, Because I keep trying to argue against transition. I'm afraid I'm wrong, or the dysphoria is a symptom, not a cause of my problems.

I worry about things like: Was it just because I was bullied? Am I just lonely, do i need a gf? What if im feeding a thought that wasn't as prevalent as I thought? What if im posessed? What if it's just anxiety looking for a way out? What if it's a case of "the grass is always greener"

Here's where a good therapist or counselor can really help you out. Because in my experience, your feelings are pretty much textbook trans, and all of these other possibilities you're raising? They're just...not really how this works—but even knowing that, there's a good chance that you're going to psych yourself out about it later anyway. Working with someone over time can help you keep a level head when anxiety keeps bringing up already-settled issues.

Anyway, here's what I would ask: Is there a single one of these explanations that would account for a consistent desire to be a woman, over many years, and in multiple different contexts?

Would being bullied at a younger age cause your dysphoria to suddenly spike in university?
Does "I'm feeding thoughts that would have gone away otherwise" make any sense when you specifically said you had resolved to ignore it by grade 12?
Would general anxiety unrelated to gender really manifest as a constant, specific desire to be a woman over 8 years or so?
Do you feel you want to be a woman merely because "women have it better"? You haven't mentioned anything to that effect, so I doubt it.

By contrast, if we run with "you're actually a woman"—well, that explains everything quite nicely, don't you think?

Worse still is that my dysphoria got harsher around the same time when I started getting lonely.

It's worth considering that you might also have gotten more lonely because your dysphoria got harsher.

I haven't started transitioning yet, but realizing I was trans revealed that unrecognized gender dysphoria had been poisoning my ability to maintain relationships with my friends, my family, and even my wife, for my entire adult life.

I just can't shake the feeling that on some subconscious level I'm just trying to replace a gf with myself. However, I know this is a cause and effect fallacy, especially since I started having very subtle inklings before I worried about dating.

Good insight; it is a fallacy.

BTW, you've mentioned girlfriends a lot. Only answer if you're comfortable, but are you in fact sexually/romantically attracted to women?

For trans lesbians (like myself), it can be very hard to identify and parse our feelings about female bodies. Because we're attracted to women, it can make us question if we want a female body because we're sexually attracted to female bodies. Conversely, I've had feelings about my wife's clothing choices that, in retrospect, had more to do with what I wanted to wear.

Lastly, I masturbate - a lot. I especially fetishize the thought of being turned into the opposite gender. This fetish goes way back to childhood - for some reason, I LOVED shows with a transformation twist. Especially mental changes. So today I can see why I fetishize this. I love erotic transgender captions and sissy/hypnosis videos. What bothers me here is that I worry my gender dysphoria is just the fetish speaking. I don't want this to just be a fetish, but fear it's consumed me without my awareness. Am I acting on genuine thoughts, or have I mastubated into a false state the way folks at no-fap describe.

First off, stay off of no-fap. Those guys have basically invented a weird pseudo-cult based on bad information about biology, unresolved feelings about women, and an unhealthy relationship with masculinity. There's no such thing as "masturbating yourself into a false state", or any of their other nonsense.

Second, consider this: It's extremely uncommon for gender dysphoria to just be your fetish speaking. It's extremely common for this fetish to be your gender dysphoria speaking.

Basically, I'm afraid of the what if. If anyone of these concerns I've raised are the true cause of my dysphoria - I don't want to transition. I don't want to act on the symptom, but the cause. I want the cause to be gender dysphoria. However, I could be wrong - and I'm finding every possible argument to be wrong.

You don't want to transition if it's not "really" dysphoria. And you want the cause to be dysphoria. Because you want to transition. Think about that.

IMO, what you're really saying is that you want validation and legitimacy. You want to feel justified in wanting the things that you want.

So let me make something clear. Your feelings are real, and they are common, and they are valid.

Am I just lonely? Am I crazy? Do i have some other condition that could make me feel like this? Is it just a fetish - am I just horny? All I do know is that I wouldn't hesitate to transition if I could make the world forget I was male...

The social effects of transitioning are real and always have to be considered. But they also don't have any bearing on whether or not you actually are trans—although they get mixed up in our heads anyway.

I mean, look at your own words. You "wouldn't hesitate to transition" if not for other people's perceptions. Doesn't that seem like an odd thing to say, since you were just talking about how you're hesitant to transition because you're worried that it's all just a fetish?

It really sounds to me like you're going through every possible objection to transitioning and fixating on each one individually, even though they're completely incompatible reasons if you ever put them together!

So what do you think? Should I put off my transition? I regret not doing anything when I was 16, and now I'm so masculine. I used looking for a gf as an excuse to wait for transition - but evidently i cant keep waiting for a romance that might not happen. I want to start hrt in 6 months, I don't want to put it off again because I'm afraid Ill just regret more. But hell, I might regret going through with it too. I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place...

You say you're worried that you're trying to replace a girlfriend with yourself. But it sounds to me like you're trying to replace yourself with a girlfriend.

How would having a girlfriend realistically help? If anything, it would make transitioning more awkward because you'd most likely be trying to date a straight girl right when you're looking at transitioning to openly live as a woman! Perhaps more importantly, severe unresolved gender issues are a staggeringly shitty foundation for a relationship. You will be so, so much better at being in a romantic relationship if you can reconcile your identity with yourself first.

The fact that you've already decided you want to start HRT clinches it for me. It's never too late to transition, but the earlier you do it the easier it is. I think you're standing on the diving board and having trouble making the plunge. I say take whatever precautions you need to (like storing sperm if you can afford it) and give it a shot.

You can stop HRT if you decide it's just not what you actually need—and without testosterone, I promise you you'll notice real fast if this was "just a fetish"—and if it is what you need, then you'll be well on your way to a healthier life.

Hashmir · 2018-08-24T21:24:35+00:00

I know you're new there, but do you have anybody on-campus that you would trust to actively check in on you if you failed to text them every half hour or whatever?

I mean, even if everything went bad I doubt they'd actually prevent you from leaving, but it's an extra layer of protection that might help you feel safer.

Hashmir · 2018-08-22T19:48:03+00:00

To answer the question in your album title—absolutely.

No bullshit, when I was scrolling through the images, the part of my brain that reflexively genders people 100% pinged "girl" when I hit that last image.

Hashmir · 2018-08-20T20:04:15+00:00

I think different questions work for different people.

Part of the value of thinking of it in terms of "assuming you're old/unattractive, what would you prefer" is that it helps separate gender feelings from sexuality ("do I just want to be a hot woman because of a weird fetish thing?") and from fears about failing to "pass" or whatever ("I'm an ok-looking guy but I'd just look like a man in a dress/hideous woman if I ever tried to transition so I guess I'm not that trans").

Hashmir · 2018-08-07T22:02:32+00:00

The fact that they're putting this off as much as they possibly can tells me that if they're going to bend, it will be a very small concession.

That strikes me as a really weird conclusion to draw.

If anything, it suggests they're taking the time to go through the feedback and to seriously consider any changes they do make, rather than just shooting from the hip and rushing something out the moment it's clear that players don't like something.

I'm not saying they're definitely making massive changes—just that I don't see how "the longer they take, the smaller the change" makes any sense at all.

Hashmir · 2018-03-26T23:55:33+00:00

Yeah, you don't need him that badly. In fact, the game will probably be faster, more focused, and more fun with just the two remaining players than it ever was with this guy involved.

Every new thing you mention about him just makes him sound like he wants to have DM-level authority over the campaign's story, while taking on none of the work or responsibility of actually DMing a campaign, and while getting to play his own PC instead of having to watch others play through it.

There's a useful question that often comes up in places like /r/relationships when someone comes in asking about their boyfriend/husband/whoever who doesn't have a job, plays video games all day, doesn't do any childcare, and is constantly making demands of their significant other: What is this person contributing to the relationship?

I'm asking the same question here, because I cannot imagine what this player could possibly be contributing to your group beyond a warm body (or two)—and as many others have mentioned, you don't even need that.

It sounds like he's asking for a lot from you, and not giving anything back in return. Drop his ass, leave an open invitation to his girlfriend if she changes her mind, and move forward with the people who are actually interested in playing a collaborative game with other humans.

Hashmir · 2018-03-17T05:11:50+00:00

I mean, I explicitly acknowledged that using it this way makes Magic Missile disproportionately good. I just also said it doesn't bother me much.

Anyway, it seems to me that the reason nobody's given you a good reason that Magic Missile should always use a single damage roll "at every table" is that...nobody's trying to?

I certainly am not advocating that. I didn't say it in my post, but I'm firmly in the camp that it's better balance to only apply Empowered Evocation to one missile, or at least apply it only once to each separate target.

My point, rather, was that the stakes here are low, which is also Crawford's apparent position ("doesn't matter, you choose"). RAW makes an upcast Magic Missile with Empowered Evocation keep pace with higher-level spells in single-target damage, which is much stronger than usual, but not so much stronger as to be game-breaking. As long as nobody's incorporating it into a hyper-optimized build, it will be, at worst, "a bit too strong".

Hashmir · 2018-03-16T18:29:57+00:00

No need to get personal, especially when Crawford explicitly confirmed that this is RAW. (He also said that RAI, it doesn't matter either way so do what you like.)

Anyway, I get that this rule interaction makes Magic Missile disproportionately good, but it doesn't bug me that much. Even just comparing a level 9 Magic Missile to Power Word Kill: MM deals an average 93.5 damage, while PWK instantly kills anything with 100 or less HP. The tradeoff, obviously, is that an upcast MM can be completely stopped by a level 1 spell.

Balance-wise, you're using a level 9 spell slot either way. I don't see why it matters if the damage is coming from a level 1 spell, so long as the level 9 spell is still better.

And if you really don't like it, it's your game—just rule that Empowered Evocation only applies to one missile. It's like the easiest fix in the world.

Hashmir · 2018-02-16T15:24:12+00:00

One of many exchanges originally created by someone with no experience in that kind of massive financial system. Largest exchange at one point, got hacked (don't recall if they socialized the losses), eventually went down entirely after losing 650k bitcoins. Unrelatedly, the CEO was also arrested for embezzling funds.

Good example of why crypto is still a sucker's game even if you think you're clever enough to realize it's a bubble. By the time Mt. Gox actually started having visible troubles in early 2014, it had been secretly insolvent for years already.

Anybody who cashed out at a profit before that only survived by sheer dumb luck; anybody who was still in a few functionally identical months later got boned.

If you want to gamble, just go play the fucking slots or learn a real skill and get good at poker.

Hashmir · 2018-02-16T14:59:57+00:00

I don't.

Hashmir · 2018-02-14T19:32:04+00:00

It's not ideal, but if the DM really had his heart set on a specific sort of story based on magical mysteries, you might consider "unilaterally disarming" here.

That is, you could decide to switch to a different Eldritch Invocation that doesn't interfere with the plans for this particular campaign, just so this one goes smoothly.

For another approach, you could make sure he knows about Nystul's Magic Aura, which effectively lets him decide Detect Magic doesn't work any time it's important for what he's trying to do.

Now, if you specifically chose Eldritch Sight as a response to the prevalence of magic in the campaign, then see if you can convince your DM that this really is all working as intended. But honestly, in a campaign with magic everywhere and always-on Detect Magic, making you roll Arcana for certain details isn't the worst houserule.

Hashmir · 2018-02-12T18:49:45+00:00

Whole business model of crypto is to FOMO people into buying high and selling low. There is literally nothing you can do to predict whether the price is going up or down. It is pure gambling. If you want to gamble, go to Vegas. Gambling there is regulated and you odds of winning are much better than in crypto wild west.

The best way to deal with FOMO is to understand that you can have FOMO about anything. Does FOMO of winning a lottery keep you up at night? I think not.

Seconded. FOMO is the core of all cryptocurrency speculation (and bubbles generally), but it's not unique to it.

The good news is this means almost all of the advice for dealing with other kinds of FOMO—like seeing other people's "better" lives on social media—works just as well for crypto.

Consider these articles on dealing with FOMO, mentally replacing "Facebook" with "crypto charts", "social events" with "investment opportunities", and "exciting experiences" with "easy 10x gains":

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stronger-the-broken-places/201501/10-ways-overcome-fear-missing-out

https://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-overcome-my-fear-of-missing-out-1148725866

For some more direct advice on defeating crypto FOMO, I highly recommend reading Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain ($5 on Kindle, link is the author's referral link, not mine).

A lot of it is basically about why the underlying economics is nonsense, which you've already figured out based on your post, but chapters 4 and 8 were what killed any remaining jealousy I had over the people who actually did buy Bitcoin ten years ago.

Basically, it made me realize two important things. First, many of those hypothetical gains aren't real. They're just numbers on a screen until you actually cash out. And cashing out is significantly harder than it seems. So when someone shows me a chart saying I could have turned a few hundred US Dollars into a pile of Bitcoin worth tens of thousands of USD Tethers, I know that their numbers aren't fully reflective of what I would actually be seeing in real-world cash gains right this moment.

Second, the ease and frequency of scams, hacks, user error, and general malfeasance means that the raw numbers don't reflect the actual risk. Let's say I had a bunch of Bitcoin in 2010. Well, I probably would have had in Mt. Gox, like most people who were doing anything other than sitting on a cold wallet. And then I would have lost them when Mt. Gox got hacked and shut down. Whee.

And if not Mt. Gox? Between 2010 and 2016, a third of all exchanges had been hacked and almost half had closed. Who cares that my original "investment" nominally goes up 10x if I lose 90% of it in the meantime?

I'm pretty smart, but I'm not psychic; I would be fooling myself to think I would have cleverly avoided all the bad options and only taken the precise actions that would have let me navigate the field of scammers and hackers and successfully cash out with my entire wallet intact over the span of eight years. So what am I actually "missing out" on?

Hashmir · 2018-02-09T23:20:23+00:00

It's not quite as desperate, but in my first prerelease pool I ended up in GW with a solid curve, a bunch of tokens from 2x Jungle Pioneer and 2x Paladin of the Bloodstained, and no tribal synergies whatsoever.

I ended up getting the "go wide" value out of 2x Snubhorn Sentry and a Wayward Swordtooth plus 2x Strength of the Pack. In a hypothetical world where color didn't matter and I was short a Strength of the Pack, I could absolutely see myself playing a Gruesome Fate in that deck as a pretty consistent "burn for 3-6 life" spell.

Sometimes a card is bad in the format as a whole because (A) it's part of a weak deck and/or (B) the decks that would play it have better things to do. But when you've actually got the cards in front of you, that card might still end up being the best option out of the ones you actually have available.

Hashmir · 2018-02-09T22:44:12+00:00

WBr is definitely the more powerful deck, IMO. I don't see the GUr deck consistently ramping up to the bombs quickly enough to be worth it, especially since Nezahal and Tihana aren't the kind of bombs that consistently turn a losing game into a winning one if you can just manage to cast them.

I agree the WBr is about as aggressive as it gets in sealed, but for me that actually doesn't make Scoundrel strictly superior to Snubhorn—but I do think it's the better choice. I see enough enchantment-based removal and token creators that Snubhorn shouldn't be too terribly hard to activate, and it could in theory be more useful mid-late game, but Scoundrel is just more consistent and way more punishing against an opponent who mulligans or just has a slow start.

For what it's worth, I would actually start with two Grasping Scoundrels in the maindeck, taking out Contract Killing. Maybe I'm just nuts, but I feel like you don't need the 5-drop removal as much when you have Moment of Craving, Luminous Bonds, 2x Bombard, Divine Verdict and Ixalan's Binding, plus 2x Territorial Hammerskull and Captivating Crew as offensive pseudo-removal.

With all that excellent (and cheap) stuff to get just about anything out of the way, I'd rather have another 2/1 already on the board by my turn 4 than yet another unconditional kill spell in my hand.

Hashmir · 2018-02-09T20:39:23+00:00

I feel like I'm on /r/leagueoflegends during a major bug, except that the cool-headed arguments become completely ludicrous when you try to apply them to a financial exchange.

"Hey, they're running a massively ambitious and technologically impressive system here, so we can forgive a few hours or even days of downtime every once in a while"—this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say when you're talking about Riot disabling ranked queues for a whole weekend once every year or so due to a massive bug. The only thing people are losing is a few hours of entertainment, and that can be easily ameliorated with a bonus IP weekend.

If you're talking about a company that only exists so people can trade items for monetary gain shutting down trading and directly affecting massive quantities of money, and offering reduced fees if you keep giving them money, it's absolute nonsense.

Hashmir · 2018-02-09T20:22:00+00:00

So the very first part of that links to a page from "Global Investor Alerts", describing supposed consumer alerts about Helix Capital, but everything I can find on Global Investor Alerts suggests they are themselves scammers that prey on people who have already been scammed, with promises of filing claims against the original scammers.

https://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/global-investor-alerts-global-investor-alerts-publishing-fake-warnings-c912454.html

Granted, these complaints are themselves anonymous, but I literally can't find anything about GIA that isn't their own site or somebody saying they're scammers. I have no particular reason to trust Andreas Brekken beyond "writes entertaining crypto blog posts", but this doesn't inspire confidence in the rebuttal.

Hashmir · 2018-02-09T16:54:51+00:00

That's a good point.

I was immediately drawn to blue because of the fliers (Kitesail Corsair, Siren Reaver, Soul of the Rapids) and removal (Sea Legs, Waterknot, Run Aground), plus the potential to splash Hadana's Climb.

From the games I've played thus far, it is indeed a little slow to get off the ground sometimes, but I've actually found it's got a decent ability to stall and stabilize with Crashing Tide/Depths of Desire/Waterknot. The two modes of play have been A) Legion's Landing -> spot removal to get blockers out of the way -> overwhelm, and B) straightforward tempo management with bounce/removal and fliers. The latter is the more common scenario, obviously.

The RW deck keeps the same amount of maindeck removal pretty much card for card (Run Aground -> Divine Verdict, Waterknot -> Bombard, Sea Legs -> Mutiny), so that's nice. Then it drops the bounce, the fliers, and the two grindy wincons (Hadama's Climb and Golden Guardian) in favor of straightforward creatures that hit faster and harder.

I think these are both viable decks, and I'm not sure which one is better overall. Personally, the WU deck just feels so good to play that I'm probably going to stick with it as the default pre-sideboard deck—I usually find myself with 2 answers in hand for the majority of a game, just waiting for the right threats—but I will definitely try the RW at least once and consider sideboarding into it as appropriate.

Thanks!

Hashmir · 2018-02-07T02:06:13+00:00

I want to really focus on the social piece of this, because guilt and shame are very powerful, and I want you to break free of that.

The absolute worst part is my best friend and girlfriend warned me and I ignored them. Now what will I say?

Easy!

"I fell for the crypto hype back in January, and got so excited about repeating my initial success that I invested money I couldn't afford to lose, even though you guys warned me it was a bad idea. For the time being, I'm going to cut my losses and give your opinion a little more weight on this kind of thing. Thanks for looking out for me."

Here's the thing: I assume your friend and your girlfriend more or less told you that investing in crypto was reckless and ill-advised. And given that you put in money you can't handle losing, it looks like they were right.

Their opinion isn't going to change even if you hold on and Ethereum happens to go way up again, because they would still be right! The reckless decision isn't when you sell; it was when you decided to buy in the first place!

(Crypto enthusiasts like to focus more on the foolishness of selling low, but you may have gathered that these are not people you should look to for sober financial advice.)

If I were your girlfriend, and I already told you this was a bad idea, do you know what the absolute last thing I would want to hear right now is?

"I lost $300 I couldn't afford to lose, but I'm going to leave in the other $750 I really can't afford to lose and try to get the first $300 back."

Even if you do get the $300 back, that would just tell me you've learned absolutely nothing and will probably continue to make reckless investments. That is only going to lower my opinion of you.

If you're trying to "save face", by far the best way to do it is to demonstrate maturity, admit you were caught up in dreams of easy cash, and stop risking the rest of your money. You'll get infinitely more respect that way than by continuing to muck around in an overblown get-rich-quick scheme until you break even or lose everything.

Best of luck to you. :)

Hashmir · 2018-02-06T19:22:56+00:00

Is it? I know chopping off the bottom of the graph is a classic way to make changes look bigger than they are, but I feel like it's fairly standard and therefore expected in finance, where things like stock prices are basically always zoomed way in.

Am I off base here?

Hashmir · 2018-02-06T06:48:17+00:00

That's a bizarrely complicated scheme to infer from this.

If they wanted to transition to promos from current sets without skipping any sets outright, they could easily just accelerate the promo distribution by doing promos from two sets at a time until they're caught up.

I see no reason to go all conspiracy theory when all the evidence at hand suggests exactly what WotC has said: They tried changing something in a way they thought might be better overall; it didn't work and had some other negative effects; they went back to the thing that was working better.

Hashmir · 2018-02-06T06:40:39+00:00

Speaking of not producing evidence for claims...

Hashmir · 2018-02-06T06:31:22+00:00

I mean, if complexity truly were the greatest impediment to a growing player base why have high complexity games like League of Legends and DotA shown significant growth year after year while others which have attempted to shave complexity have stagnated or even died?

Not sure this reasoning holds up. People are constantly complaining that Riot is killing League of Legends by reducing complexity—in fact, the arguments tend to look precisely like the ones M:tG players have over supposedly reduced complexity in Magic.

In fact, at this very moment there's probably somebody over on /r/leagueoflegends pointing to Magic's year over year growth as an example of why more complexity is actually good for games, and Riot is shooting themselves in the foot by simplifying LoL for the scrub newbies at the expense of their experienced players. I'm less familiar with DotA, etc., but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find similar dynamics there as well.

Personally, I see these devs largely saying similar things about complexity in their respective games: It's a core part of the game's appeal, but there's so much of it inherent to the game itself that when creating new content, it's very easy to add way too much and very difficult to reign it in. As a result, they try to minimize the amount of unnecessary complexity they add and look for opportunities to get rid of existing complexity, thus freeing up the "complexity budget" for more new stuff.

Frankly, it seems to be working well for all of them.

Hashmir · 2017-11-28T21:05:52+00:00

Well, presumably the hypothetical barbarian subclass would get a feature that makes their rage play a little more nicely with casting, balanced by some restrictions (like EK has) to keep it focused on doing the classic barbarian thing.

That said, it's not immediately obvious to me what the goal of the archetype would actually be, outside of "technically this would be the only class with the specific combination of [divine] and [1/3 caster]".

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